mirror of
https://github.com/TheAnachronism/docspell.git
synced 2024-11-13 02:31:10 +00:00
94 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
94 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
---
|
||
layout: docs
|
||
position: 4
|
||
title: Documentation
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
# {{page.title}}
|
||
|
||
Docspell assists in organizing large amounts of PDF files that are
|
||
typically scanned paper documents. You can associate tags, set
|
||
correspondends, what a document is concerned with, a name, a date and
|
||
some more. If your documents are associated with this meta data, you
|
||
should be able to quickly find them later using the search
|
||
feature. But adding this manually to each document is a tedious
|
||
task. What if most of it could be attached automatically?
|
||
|
||
## How it works
|
||
|
||
Documents have two main properties: a correspondent (sender or
|
||
receiver that is not you) and something the document is about. Usually
|
||
it is about a person or some thing – maybe your car, or contracts
|
||
concerning some familiy member, etc.
|
||
|
||
1. You maintain a kind of address book. It should list all possible
|
||
correspondents and the concerning people/things. This grows
|
||
incrementally with each new unknown document.
|
||
2. When docspell analyzes a document, it tries to find matches within
|
||
your address book. It can detect the correspondent and a concerning
|
||
person or thing. It will then associate this data to your
|
||
documents.
|
||
3. You can inspect what docspell has done and correct it. If docspell
|
||
has found multiple suggestions, they will be shown for you to
|
||
select one. If it is not correctly associated, very often the
|
||
correct one is just one click away.
|
||
|
||
The set of meta data that docspell uses to draw suggestions from, must
|
||
be maintained manually. But usually, this data doesn't grow as fast as
|
||
the documents. After a while there is a quite complete address book
|
||
and only once in a while it has to be revisited.
|
||
|
||
Besides extracting the text from documents to analyze, docspell also
|
||
converts all files into PDF files. This unifies the different formats
|
||
your documents may be in originally and makes them more accessible
|
||
from other systems and the future.
|
||
|
||
## Terms
|
||
|
||
In order to better understand these pages, some terms should be
|
||
explained first.
|
||
|
||
### Item
|
||
|
||
An **Item** is roughly your (pdf) document, only that an item may span
|
||
multiple files, which are called **attachments**. And an item has
|
||
**meta data** associated:
|
||
|
||
- a **correspondent**: the other side of the communication. It can be
|
||
an organization or a person.
|
||
- a **concerning person** or **equipment**: a person or thing that
|
||
this item is about. Maybe it is an insurance contract about your
|
||
car.
|
||
- **tag**: an item can be tagged with custom tags. A tag can have a
|
||
*category*. This is intended for grouping tags, for example a
|
||
category `doctype` could be used to group tags like `bill`,
|
||
`contract`, `receipt` etc. Usually an item is not tagged with more
|
||
than one tag of a category.
|
||
- a **item date**: this is the date of the document – if this is not
|
||
set, the created date of the item is used.
|
||
- a **due date**: an optional date indicating that something has to be
|
||
done (e.g. paying a bill, submitting it) about this item until this
|
||
date
|
||
- a **direction**: one of "incoming" or "outgoing"
|
||
- a **name**: some item name, defaults to the file name of the
|
||
attachments
|
||
- some **notes**: arbitrary descriptive text. You can use markdown
|
||
here, which is appropriately formatted in the web application.
|
||
|
||
### Collective
|
||
|
||
The users of the application are part of a **collective**. A
|
||
**collective** is a group of users that share access to the same
|
||
items. The account name is therefore comprised of a *collective name*
|
||
and a *user name*.
|
||
|
||
All users of a collective are equal; they have same permissions to
|
||
access all items. The items don't belong to a user, but to the
|
||
collective.
|
||
|
||
That means, to identify yourself when signing in, you have to give the
|
||
collective name and your user name. By default it is separated by a
|
||
slash `/`, for example `smith/john`. If your user name is the same as
|
||
the collective name, you can omit one; so `smith/smith` can be
|
||
abbreviated to just `smith`.
|